Comcast, Liberty Global Among Backers for Plume’s New Open Source Initiative

Comcast, Liberty Global and Bell Canada are supporting a new open source software initiative announced earlier this week by Wi-Fi technology vendor Plume.

At the Broadband World Forum in Berlin, Plume jointly announced, along with Samsung, that it was rendering open-source the Plume Middle Layer software it uses for gateways, modems, routers, access points, extenders, set-top boxes, IoT hubs, smart speaker and other Wi-Fi-connected devices.

The software will now be called OpenSync.

Plume says the OpenSync framework is “compatible with and leverages other open source initiatives and industry alliances,” including Reference Design Kit, the open source set-top and gateway software stack backed by Comcast, Liberty Global and eight other cable operators.

"For Liberty Global, a critical element of exploiting our broadband capabilities and delivering a superior connectivity experience to our customers is to ensure that we can continuously optimize Wi-Fi performance within a customer's home,” said Dan Hennessy, European CTO of Liberty Global, in a statement. “It is also clear to us that in creating those capabilities, we need to intelligently optimize performance across homes in close proximity to each another, which is common in our footprint. This is why we've already used elements of the OpenSync framework to optimize Wi-Fi in millions of homes and look forward to investigating ways in which the initiative might be applied to other use cases that may benefit our customers.”

‘"We've realized tremendous value from the RDK software stack in our advanced gateways," added Fraser Stirling, senior vpDigital Home, Devices & AI at Comcast. "Plume's PML is already integrated with RDK and deployed within our footprint, and we look forward to incorporating additional elements of OpenSync in the near future. The ability to deploy OpenSync atop the open-source RDK software further demonstrates the power and versatility of our approach. With more than 40 million RDK devices deployed globally, the RDK community is increasingly focused on new innovation for gateways and in-home mesh networking.”